Is Your Healthcare Organization Ready to Survive a Data Breach?

The healthcare sector continues to be a goldmine for cybercriminals. As reported by a 2016 research conducted by the Ponemon Institute, 89% of healthcare companies have undergone a data privacy breach which resulted in the destruction or theft of client information.

More notably, the damage of a data breach for healthcare is more costly than other verticals— and the extent of data breaches is anticipated to grow. For instance, It has been predicted that the ransomware attack rate against healthcare sector will multiply by four times by 2020.

So, what is the reason behind this massive rise in attacks?

More Data, More Issues for Healthcare Organizations

The explosion in data creation is one primary offender. As reported by the International Data Corporation (IDC), six out of ten healthcare apps will gather real-time location data and clinical Internet of Things (IoT) device data by the next year. Also, over 40% of healthcare companies across the planet will work with the Internet of Things enabled biosensors in the coming two years.

The second culprit is meager cybersecurity spending. Healthcare organizations designate fewer than 6% of their Information Technology resources for cybersecurity, as reported by the 2017 study by Symantec Corp and HIMSS Analytics, which is considerably lesser than the industry average.

The utter importance of healthcare information is also pushing the rise in assaults against the area. The FBI says that digital health data is way more helpful to hackers as compared to financial details.

A Data Security Breach Has Significant Consequences

Considering all the factors, the consequence of the rapidly growing data attack volume is wide-ranging across the entire healthcare sector. For instance, around half of the healthcare executives state that cybersecurity threats create possible hurdles with respect to mergers and acquisitions.

The most apparent outcome of a data breach is the financial burden. In the 2017 research conducted by Ponemon Institute titled Cost of Data Breach, the aggregate attacked healthcare record incur the cost burden of $380 — it is triple the universal aggregate across industries. In the United States of America, healthcare organizations can risk heavy penalties for infringing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA. Even though the $19 million of HIPAA violation fines published by the Office of Civil Rights had fallen somewhat last year from 2016, it is still three times more than the penalties incurred by healthcare organizations in 2015, as reported by the Telebehavioral Health Institute.

Apart from the financial burden, a healthcare data infringement can affect the company’s standing. This is especially alarming because over half of subjects stated they would switch their health care provider after a data breach, as reported by a 2015 study from TransUnion Healthcare.

Bolstering the Security Immune System

Given the healthcare sector’s weakness and the terrible outcomes of a data violation, it is not surprising that spending on security is projected to surpass $65 billion in the coming five years, as per a 2017 study from Cybersecurity Ventures.

Data proliferation has caused a tremendous amount of false positives and records. This needs the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to counter cyber attacks in real time. The security immune system plan provides a complete unified plan to safeguard your company and its IT setup.

The policy is focused around an Artificial Intelligence nucleus of security orchestration and analytics appliances that constantly process the various risk variables across the whole environment of inter-connected capacities. This robust alliance promotes the enhancement of visibility into unknown risks that individual investigators may otherwise not see.